Photography

Tag Archives: Bin

This was something different for me. I was waiting for my wife to finish work so I started walking around her office building and found this random bin with some nice light. The texture of the wall behind it was also very interesting to me. I have no idea why the bin was there, but I was just seeing the light and shooting.

Last month I entered this image “Bin It” into the Open small print category of my local camera club (Northern Tasmanian Camera Club). It didn’t go well because the judges couldn’t figure out what it was about. That is fine, it is a viewers prerogative to judge the image they are looking at and in this case it didn’t speak to them. One of the judges asked me what I was shooting here and my first response was “the light”. That is a basic answer to that question so I want to elaborate on that a little.
The light was the first thing I saw. Next was the rough and patchy bricks, the pattern of the mortar and the different colours in the brick work. Add the smooth and slightly shiny plastic of the rubbish bin, I really liked the way that contrasted against wall. I could use the “artsy” word juxtaposition, but that really isn’t my style. To add to the scene there was also the debris on the ground which gave me another texture and the discarded starter which obviously was meant for the bin but failed to make into it. Plus there was some greenery poking through which added a small splash of colour.
So those are the things that drew me to the image, but why shoot it in the first place? I wanted to photograph this because it was there and so was I. It is mundane and ordinary, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a good photograph. Would I like to be photographing something more interesting? Hell yes, but there wasn’t anything overly interesting to shoot at the time.
These days I shoot just about anything that gets in front of my camera. I don’t have the time to wait for something better to come along because it probably won’t happen. If I see something I like I shoot it. If I see something that is boring I will probably still shoot it. I shoot the boring because there must have been something there in the first place that made me look at it. I want to stay open to any possible image and this is a result of doing just that.